The present invention relates to food products and to their methods of preparation. In particular, the present invention relates to food products prepared from a cooked cereal dough, especially ready-to-eat or breakfast cereals in flake form and to their methods of preparation.
A wide variety of food products are prepared from cooked cereal doughs especially ready-to-eat (“R-T-E”) or breakfast cereals, as well as a variety of snack products. Generally in the preparation of the cooked cereal dough, cereal or farinaceous ingredients such as various cereal flours are first admixed with other dry ingredients such as salt, minerals, starch, sugars, to form a dry blend of ingredients and then is further blended with various liquid ingredients, including moisture and heated to gelatinize or cook the starch fraction of the cereal ingredients and other starchy materials. The gelatinized or cooked mass is then worked to form homogenous or well blended cooked cereal dough. A wide variety of blending cooking, working apparatus and techniques are well known. Also, known cooked cereal dough formulation and preparation methods include formulation and processing condition variations such as those intended to increase or minimize shear depending upon desired end product attributes and skilled artisan's beliefs of such variations and their interactions on end product attributes.
More recently, the preparation of a cooked cereal dough using a cooker extruder especially a twin screw extruder has become commonplace. The cooked cereal doughs so prepared can be processed to form finished products of various size, textures, and shapes. Typically, the post, cooked cereal dough formation step involves forming suitably sized and shaped individual pieces and drying to form finished cereal base pieces such as shreds, flakes, biscuits or puffs. Thereafter, the finished dried cereal base pieces can have a topical coating applied to provide desired taste and texture attributes. For example, in the preparation of a breakfast cereal, the topical coating can include a sugar coating. In other variations, such as for seasoned snack products, the topical coating can include salt alone or in combination with various seasoning blends.
The present invention is directed to improved flake type RTE cereal products. Typically, in the cooked cereal dough is first formed into pellets in a pelletizing step. The pellets are then dried or otherwise conditioned for flaking into thin wet flakes in a flaking or flake forming step. Thereafter, the wet thin flakes are finish dried and optionally toasted.
The present invention is particularly directed to formulating selected cereal ingredients and cooking to provide a particularly heterogeneous cooked cereal dough. The present invention further includes pelletizing the heterogeneous cooked cereal dough with minimal shear to form pellets than have maintained the heterogeneous nature of their cooked cereal dough. The novel pellets can then be flaked and then finish dried in a particular manner to provide the present improved puffed heterogeneous flaked RTE cereal products.
Surprisingly, it has been found that parboiled medium grain rice can be used as a key ingredient in the preparation of cooked cereal doughs and finished food products prepared there from. It has been more surprisingly been discovered that selection of medium grain parboiled rice and use without pr hydration can be conveniently used to prepare a desirable heterogeneous RTE cereal flake.